Election Insiders: Behind the scenes with the people who make your vote count

By Gloria Shur Bilchik

Election Insiders is an entertaining journey into the inner workings of voting, focusing on the people behind the scenes—the mapmakers, poll workers, warehouse crew, signature sleuths and others who do this democracy-defining work. In a lively, reader-friendly narrative, election workers at all levels share the ups, downs and unexpected challenges that make election day tick. Some of their stories are alarming, others are amusing, and many are reassuring. Bilchik’s thorough reporting encompasses more than a year of in-depth interviews and off-the-cuff conversations, examination of public documents, attendance at board meetings and equipment demonstrations, hands-on training, and live election day observations. The result is a one-of-a-kind glimpse into a backstage world that we voters usually don't see, but one that we all depend on to keep elections fair and secure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: May 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642379549

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What You Don’t See Matters

"Voting is a fundamental political right,

because it is preservative of all rights."

–US Supreme Court,

Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886)

QUITE POSSIBLY, A MINIMUM-WAGE maintenance worker wielding a Dustbuster could have changed American history. Could have. But, unfortunately, didn’t.

After the hanging-chad debacle of the 2000 presidential election, researchers swooped in to figure out how voting had gone so terribly wrong. In an exhaustive post-mortem study of the punch-card voting equipment in use in Florida at the time, election guru Douglas Jones of the University of Iowa concluded that the problem may have been chad jams. Underneath the platform into which voters inserted their punch cards, clumps of chads—small pieces of paper—had piled up, leftovers from previous elections. They prevented the stylus from fully perforating the ballots, creating the dimpled, hanging, and pregnant chads that turned vote counting into a nightmare. Jones’s ultimate recommendation was embarrassingly basic: Vacuum out the residue regularly.

Lesson learned: Behind the scenes in elections, things that happen or, in the case of Florida in 2000, things that don’t happen—big things and little things—things that voters never see, don’t think about, and may not even imagine—make a difference.

Voting is the essential, democracy-defining act of citizenship, yet most of us have scant knowledge of its under-the-hood mechanics. Voters see the public-facing side of elections—the poll workers, the voting machines, the ballots, the campaigners outside polling places—but those elements, among others, are just the top line. Even the most engaged voters can be unaware of—or even badly misinformed about—what happens beneath the surface to make elections tick.

With elections under attack from foreign intruders—specifically Russia and maybe China, as well—it’s more important than ever to understand the underpinnings of elections, so that we know what’s needed to keep it all from unraveling. Counter-intelligence agents and IT experts get the bulk of the glory and airtime in the critical effort to keep our elections free and fair, and they deserve the attention. They are shining a light on attacks that too many people in positions of power would rather deny, tacitly support, or even overtly solicit.

But there’s even more to safeguarding US elections than fighting off the cyber-attacks that get the headlines. Behind the scenes in the county or township where you vote, there’s a whole other world of election workers—democracy defenders—whose jobs are invisible to most voters but of equal consequence. Who are they? What do they do? And why do they do it?

The job titles of these warriors—clerk, supervisor, site manager—don’t say much about what they do. But while the generic titles and bland bullet points of their job descriptions may not spell it out, everything these election insiders do is part of an implicitly understood election-security effort. It’s just not the part that you hear about very much because, unfortunately, security has come to be narrowly defined, in everyday parlance and news reports, as cyber-security. In fact, it is much broader than that.

Much of what protects our elections consists of backstage grunt work—an endless cycle of processing voter registrations, making arrangements for polling places, figuring out how to implement new laws and regulations, drawing maps, answering voters’ questions, keeping track of expenditures, vacuuming out the chads (now out of style, thankfully), packing and unpacking election day materials, and a myriad of other tasks that are outside of most voters’ fields of vision. Elections are only as good as the people who run them.

But what do you do the other 364 days of the year, is every election manager’s least-favorite, but probably most frequently asked question. If there’s one thing that election administrators want the public to know, it’s that they have full-time jobs, even in off years. That’s why they call them election cycles, said a manager in my local jurisdiction. For us, the next election starts as soon as the last one is over.

No matter what their job, everyone you see working on election day, as well as the phalanx of others operating out of public view, is in one way or another, a security guard. Obviously, elections involve a lot of rules. These workers live and breathe them, doing the sometimes rewarding, but often maddeningly detailed work that helps hold our democracy together. They measure success by how smoothly things run and by the voting public’s acceptance of the results of the election. The ideal election day, one worker told me, is one that is so uneventful that we are completely bored.

Job titles and descriptions vary from election office to election office, from county to county, and from state to state—as do workloads. Some are better at their jobs than others. Everybody makes mistakes. They’re not all heroes. Some tolerate the job just for the paycheck—usually not a very large one, it should be noted—and many don’t stick around for long. But it’s probably safe to say that most of the people who stay in these jobs—some for decades—do their work with a collective goal of making elections go right. These behind-the-scenes democracy defenders, and the jobs they do, are the focus of this book.

Elections are approximations, and a certain amount of confusion, error, malfunction, and even fraud inevitably creeps into far-flung and myriad polling places, wrote journalist David Von Drehle in a 2010 Time article. Voters ignore or misinterpret instructions. Volunteer poll workers misapply rules. Machines fail, sometimes in subtle ways that aren’t noticed. It takes a big effort—even in small jurisdictions—to keep it all together.

For elections to be perceived as meaningful exercises worthy of our participation, voters need to sense that the game is on the up and up. We want to be certain not only that our votes are tamper proof and our personal data protected, but also that the election structure itself is fair, with reasonable rules properly and equitably enforced. We want convenient polling places and hours of operation. We expect to be recognized as eligible to vote when we show up and to know that people who don’t qualify can’t game the system. We want to be confident that our votes will be recorded as intended and that they will be counted—exactly once. Is that too much to ask? Of course not.

In Australia, voting is mandatory. Non-voters can be fined up to eighty Australian dollars for not participating, and the result is, typically, a 90 percent turnout. In the United States, we encourage voting, celebrate it with I Voted stickers, and beat up our collective self over low turnouts and other people’s lack of information about candidates and issues. However, as a nation, we’re not very good at following through on our own patriotic exhortations about the importance and benefits of voting. While voter turnout has risen in recent election cycles, we’re still topping out at a less-than-stellar 60 percent, and that was for the high-impact 2016 presidential election. In the November 2018 midterms, voter turnout was between 50.3 and 53.4 percent of the citizen voting-age population, depending on whose statistics are cited. That was the highest rate for a midterm election since 1914, but still a rather dismal number, considering what was at stake. As Thomas Jefferson once commented, We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.

Americans don’t vote for a vast variety of reasons. One of them, unfortunately, is distrust. We like to call ourselves the greatest democracy in the world, but underneath that veneer, for many people, there is an underbelly of doubt in the system. Some of these misgivings are justified, spawned by people who make headlines by perverting the process. Some are the result of deliberate disinformation and propaganda. But a significant portion comes from nothing more than a lack of knowledge of how things work. And, of course, cynicism and partisanship play a role, too: Democrats accuse Republicans of skewing the vote by suppressing voters. Republicans accuse Democrats of trying to register people who shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Third parties and independents complain of being unfairly excluded from the system or forced to jump through extra hoops to get on the ballot. A large swath of eligible voters hears it all and decides to abstain, calling the whole thing a rigged system in which their votes don’t count, anyway. Why bother?

For those who do bother, many begin to wonder about election operations only on election day itself, and often only when things appear to be going wrong. We are, to an alarming extent, election blind. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair once said, The single hardest thing for a practising [sic] politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh … before going back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ’n’ roll … For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.

Elections are not magic. But they are, in my view, rather wondrous, in the same way that US Postal Service workers are amazing in their ability to—for the vast majority of mailings— take an envelope with an address and a stamp and get it to its intended destination. Most of us don’t know how they do it, but it works. Voting is like that, too. We show up at a polling place, or we fill out a mail-in ballot. Our vote gets recorded. We end up with a credibly elected government and a peaceful transfer of power. I am in awe of how well the system works— even with its many undeniable flaws.

Just before the November 2018 midterm elections, I accompanied a group of high school students on a backstage tour of our local election board’s headquarters. Our tour guide was Eric Fey, one of the top administrators. He took us into places most people never get to see. We got a glimpse of workers sorting voter registration cards, checking signatures on petitions, and getting equipment ready for election day. Those two hours gave me a tantalizing taste of what goes on out of public view and sparked my curiosity. That tour also helped me realize that a case study in election management was right in my own back yard.

Everyone lives in an election jurisdiction—the official term for the local government entity that oversees elections. In the United States, there are about 8,000 of them. Among the tiniest is Petroleum County, Montana, with 364 registered voters. The largest is Los Angeles County, with nearly five million voters. Most are small, with a median of 2,000 registered voters. In fact, a third of the local election jurisdictions in the United States are small towns or counties with very few staffers dedicated to elections. But overall, larger jurisdictions—meaning, generally, those encompassing more than 50,000 registered voters—serve most of the national population. Regardless of the size of the jurisdiction, many election challenges are universal, and keeping elections secure is a shared, top priority.

I live and vote in St. Louis County, Missouri, which has the biggest election operation in the state, with about 750,000 registered voters, 400 polling places, and 3,000 election-day workers to manage. It ranks among the twenty-five to thirty largest jurisdictions in the nation, and it is my base of operations for this book.

Over the past eighteen months, I’ve met with scores of workers at the election office, learning about their responsibilities and observing them on the job. I reviewed documents, attended public meetings, sat in on training sessions, worked as an official election judge, and hovered around headquarters on several election days. My goal has been to try to understand the intricacies of jobs we voters know very little about, to gain insight into the challenges, and to get a sense of how this work fits into the overall picture of keeping elections fair.

My research took me into areas I did not know existed. And as I learned about how elections worked in St. Louis County, I began to see parallels to similar jobs, processes, and unexpected occurrences elsewhere. I had stumbled into a microcosm of the American election world. And while the project began locally, in the end, it led me far afield. Interspersed throughout this narrative, you will find many anecdotes, news stories, and election oddities from around the US. These stories help prove not only that no two election jurisdictions are alike, but also that despite their differences, they share many issues, from mundane to hair-raising.

Obviously, using my home election district as my base of operations is not a random or scientifically determined choice. It’s familiar and convenient. But it turns out that it offers a fair example of the essential principles at play in most election offices around the country. Importantly, under current leadership, St. Louis County’s election board has earned a reputation in election circles as forward-thinking, well managed, and focused on being increasingly professional rather than partisan. Its leaders and workers have experienced the full range of ups and downs. The things that keep them awake at night would be instantly recognizable to people with similar jobs in other communities. Certainly, some other election districts are more familiar to the general public—such as Palm Beach County, Florida, for its confusing butterfly ballots in the 2000 presidential election, and Cook County, Illinois, where early twentieth century ballot-box stuffing was legendary. Their names stick in our collective memory because they’ve gained attention as a result of a headline-making screwup, or an incident or pattern of corruption. You don’t hear as much about the ones that mostly get it right.

I can’t say with any authority that St. Louis County’s Board of Elections is the best election-management operation in the nation. There’s no government-sponsored rating system. But measured against recommendations issued by the most influential election-focused organizations, such as the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC), St. Louis County looks pretty good. It has stayed out of the public-shame spotlight, essentially, by doing a very respectable job, while coping with occasional missteps, flawed policies, and near catastrophes that have instilled some painful lessons.

Election security requires constant vigilance. Even a cursory review of headlines from around the country makes it obvious that elections can be thrown into doubt and voter confidence undermined, not just by cyberprobes from Russia or China, but also by intentional, partisan-driven procedures and personnel decisions. Sometimes, as the horror-movie cliché goes, the call is coming from inside the house.

My take on St. Louis County’s election insiders is that their intention is to scrupulously maintain the guardrails and stay alert to potential threats and procedural pitfalls. They seem to be trying to get it right. But that’s a conclusion I’ll have to leave to you.

I’m not pretending that this book is a comprehensive, statistically driven dissertation on election security or the American way of voting. Such a project is far above my pay grade and limited expertise. I’ll leave that to academicians, statisticians, political analysts, and historians who have already tackled that daunting task. Their work offers important source material for this project.

Nor have I written an exposé of the dirty tricks that political operatives and corrupt officials employ to try to swing elections their way. I’m more interested in rightdoing than wrongdoing. But I’m not naïve: Bad things happen—both innocently and intentionally, and I have included many examples in my reporting. What I have learned, as a result of going behind the scenes, is that there are many fronts in the effort to ensure the fairness and security of American elections. I hope that I have provided some useful information about the effort—sometimes out of sight, but often in plain view—that goes into making elections work.

When I first approached the St. Louis County Board of Elections about this project, leaders of the management team, to their credit, got my intention immediately and were ready to welcome me in to see how things work and to interview employees. I began our first meeting by asking, What do you wish the public knew about what you do here? That question hit home, apparently, because in the first five minutes, the stories began to pour out. It helped, I think, that few people had ever asked.

It took a little longer to convince the governing board of commissioners, who—rightly—were more cautious about admitting a total stranger into a place where the privacy of voting and voters’ information is sacrosanct. But as I attended public meetings and began to become a familiar face around headquarters, doors began to open. I went in not knowing what I was about to find, but I was committed to reporting what presented itself. They never denied a legitimate request for documents or information. Human beings answered the phone, and managers and employees regularly returned calls and replied to emails and texts. Everyone was patient when I asked basic questions or didn’t know things I probably should have. They talked candidly about some harrowing crises and reminisced about the crazy circumstances and oddities that crop up in the life of an election worker.

They put no restrictions on what I asked employees. I don’t think they gave away any secrets, because there are very few secrets in the organization—by law. I didn’t get any special favors, no insider whistleblower information, usually not even a heads-up on public meetings, equipment demonstrations, training or test runs. They assured me that everything was posted on their website and social media, and that’s where I got my notifications, just like anyone else in the general public would.

I had no idea that an ordinary citizen could have access to some of the documents